Protected areas are the corner stone of most national conservation strategies: places where nature can survive or recover undisturbed and where people relax or seek adventure. They also provide shelter for some of the world’s more fragile human communities including many indigenous peoples. Around a tenth of the world’s land surface is now under some form of protection. A fundamental assumption is that protected areas are really protected, but unfortunately this is often not true. Many, perhaps most, protected areas are under threat, from such diverse impacts as poaching, industrial exploitation of their resources and air pollution and climate change.

Equilibrium is increasingly involved in these debates, particularly through work with IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), WWF, UNESCO and The World Bank. With these partners, we recently produced two reports on threats to protected areas and edited a book on new approaches to their designation and management.

One problem is that we still know little about how well protected areas are performing around the world. Through the Forest Innovations project, run by IUCN, WWF and GTZ, we worked on methodologies for assessing protected area effectiveness in Central America and Central Africa, organised a series of workshops to foster development of assessment and contributed to the WCPA framework for assessing protected area effectiveness. This has led to involvement in a four-year project, managed by IUCN and the University of Queensland, which aims to develop assessment systems for World Heritage sites, in association with UNESCO. The work has also resulted in a continuing debate about whether a global assessment system is needed to keep track on progress of protection.

Many conservation organisations are currently scaling up their activities from site to landscape or ecoregional level and as a result new techniques and approaches are needed. Involvement in a WWF/IUCN exercise to design a landscape approach to conservation has meant developing assessment and negotiating tools and to implementation exercises around the world and to debates about how protected areas fit into other land-uses at landscape level.

As constraints on land and money increase, governments are finding it difficult to justify protected areas in terms of biodiversity alone. A new project is looking at wider ‘arguments for protection’, such as the role of protected areas in watershed protection and provision of drinking water and the opportunities for organic agriculture around and within protected landscapes.